Last week I posted a blog about a Time magazine article regarding President Abraham Lincoln. I briefly glanced at the article a woman was reading at the YMCA Senior Center. I thought I knew the title and some of the content of the article based on my very cursory scanning of the article. Not only was the title incorrect, but the content was erroneous as well. Instead of the title being What Would Lincoln Have Done, the title was actually What Would Lincoln Do? The content had nothing to do with gun control legislation what’s-so-ever. So I was wrong on both counts.

However, I have no regrets for writing the blog that I did.

As I said in my earlier blog, prior to my writing What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?:How Today’s Leaders Have Lost Their Way, I wrote The Impotent Giant: How to Reclaim the Moral High Ground of America’s Politics. Lincoln provided the center piece for that book as President Washington provided the central focus for my Founding Fathers’ treatise.

Integrity: Always in the Forefront of Washington’s and Lincoln’s Minds

Because of Lincoln’s thirst for knowledge, and his questioning predisposition, he found it difficult to accept anything at face value, as long as he had questions and doubts about what he was experiencing. When that happened, if the issue was important enough to him, he demanded of himself to seek truth as he saw it.

A good case in point was his attitude about slavery. As he matured, his attitude about slavery changed as well. All to the better. That was true with Washington as well.

When writing the Constitution, the subject of freeing the slaves came up in the discussion. Like many of the Founding Fathers, Washington too would have liked to free the slaves from human bondage, but the consensus was that if they would have done so then, that action would have destroyed their fragile republic, so they decided to leave that onerous task to be handled by a future government, which, through the course of history, ultimately rested on President Lincoln’s shoulders.

Washington showed his allegiance to his integrity by freeing his slaves upon his death.

Although Lincoln always believed slavery was wrong, how to deal with the problem was what was at issue. Until he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, he thought like the slave owners, Thomas Jefferson and Lincoln’s idol, Henry Clay, believed. They believed the only solution was to help colonize the blacks in Africa. The reason Lincoln believed that way was he believed the whites living in America were too racist to be able to coexist with the blacks, therefore, racism would never be able to be abolished.

Lincoln was a free thinker. He was most certainly open minded. He never showed total allegiance to his party or any particular thought or idea if the circumstances dictate that not be done. Because of his facile and inquisitive mind, always seeking truth as he saw it, during the Civil War, he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation . This document granted freedom to the Confederate states’ slaves. By the end of the war, there were 200,000 slaves who fought in the Civil War.

Lincoln felt that by the former slaves having served their country to save the Union, they earned their right to full citizenship.

It’s easy to compare and contrast Lincoln’s political savvy and Washington’s commitment to their sense of integrity, no matter where such allegiance may take them, with that of today’s 21st century politician’s lack of integrity, where they consistently show their dedication to their political party rather than to the Constitution, or the American people that they swore to serve and protect.